Tag: blogs

With This Policy, I Thee Wed…it’s the Valentine’s Day #HRCarnival

Valentine

It’s my honour (you’ve got a Brit this time so it’s my blog, my spelling I’m afraid) to host the HRCarnival in this week of love, champagne, chocolates and…pancakes! OK…Mardi Gras 🙂

I put a call out for love themed blogs, but in amongst the incurable romantics some of you HR people just can’t leave the business alone…so I’ve some proper work ones too!

And there’s also a final section from me.

So here goes…

Spreading the Love!

First off I’m extending a warm HR Carnival welcome to first time contributor Jane Watson, an HR Manager from Toronto whose Talent Vanguard blog is a personal favourite of mine. Jane and HR are in a long-term relationship, though here she tells us about one or two things that she wished she’d known at the start!

Next we have Emily Jasper from The Starr Conspiracy telling us about the things she loves and why it’s important that Work Loves The Things You Love too. Even the moose!

Ian Welsh will get the pulses racing with his blog Love in the Filing Room – a cheeky Valentines look at his first job. OK, it’s not quite 50 Shades of Admin…but then I didn’t want to have a parental guidance sticker on this post!

From HR with Love is Shauna Moerke’s post. And our loveable, huggable HR Minion (without whom these carnivals wouldn’t happen!) doesn’t disappoint in this call out for all HRs hopeless romantics 🙂

Nancy Saperstone from Insight Performance offers us 5 tips for increasing the love in your company. ‘Engaged employees are happy employees, and happy employees feel the LOVE!’

”Do what you love, and do it often” says Anna Lettink. She’s spreading the love and in this blog – This Is Your Life – is talking about love for our place of work.

Ben Eubanks’ Upstart HR blog is sending thanks to the great managers who make our day special. He still hearts his last boss and in A Tribute to Great Managers he tells us why.

Here’s Steve Browne, an HR blogger and engager par excellence, and who gives us Eat. Sleep. Do HR. – do you do HR or rock it? I think we all know which one Steve does!

At TribeHR they’re bringing the love in to HR. Feline love. There’s a great visual on their HR and Open Lines of Cat Stories blog too!

Business as usual!

I’m sure not every reader wants to get slushy and lovey dovey just because its V*l*nt*n*s Day, so they can just skim through the last section and get down to business… Continue reading “With This Policy, I Thee Wed…it’s the Valentine’s Day #HRCarnival” →

Is HR Blogging the new Rock ‘n Roll??

“This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band.” (punk fanzine, 1977)

Or maybe it’s the new punk rock?

It certainly fits well with the DIY ethic of punk, the anyone-can-do-it attitude, and the embracing of individualism and free thought.

Now we’re all doing it…and we’re all reading them! It’s huge and growing. And to think that barely 6 months ago we were bemoaning the lack of new HR bloggers in the UK!

Over the last few months there has been a real increase in the number of HR professionals and recruiters starting their own blogs…some to document their thoughts and adventures, others to enhance their job hunt, others to enlighten us about their jobs or to ask for support.

But even this growth was trumped last weekend with four new bloggers starting to publish…and not shy with it either! Two of them launched with two or more posts!

Want to know who they are? Then read this blog from Alison Chisnell, herself a near veteran blogger (of 3 months!!) Four HR Blogs to Brighten Your January – such is the pace that a fifth new blog was published whilst she was writing (read last paragraph)

I love this explosion of creativity and energy, insight and soul searching. Having put my blog at the forefront of my job search I know that many companies and recruiters are reading them…even those not actively using social media are reading blogs and subscribing.

Three things I really like are:

1)      They are all different…the ones that I have read are really personal and honest, showing what it’s like to be a practicing HR professional, the highs and lows

2)      Anyone can start one…the current platforms of choice are wordpress, posterous and blogger and they make it so easy to set up and maintain a blog that there is no need to be a tecchie. All very punk!

3)      They really show what it’s like to work in HR…as Charlie Duff (Editor, HR Zone) wrote earlier today about one of the best new posts Angel of Doom:

“This is what the CIPD should be quoting as a reason to work in HR”

If you haven’t started yet…what’s stopping you?

WordPress is the new MySpace!!

 

 

 

 

It’s a Beautiful Noise…

I was watching a documentary about Neil Diamond on Saturday night and he was talking about his song Beautiful Noise, and how the idea came from his daughter listening to a parade and hearing all the different music which merged together to form a beautiful sound.

This resonated with me, as earlier that day I had been reading some really strong posts from new bloggers, and was really impressed with the way so many of the new bloggers, from different backgrounds and viewpoints, were reaching out and really making a difference, writing some interesting and thought provoking stuff.

We talk about white noise on social media, but when people dig deep and make this kind of effort to give us a different insight into our day to day interactions, then this is really a Beautiful Noise.

There were three people in particular that made a difference to me this weekend and I think they all deserve a big mention and a wider audience. Each one shines a different light on the power of social media and how it can be used to inform and transform.

Firstly, Alison Chisnell. She is an HR Director who came along to the ConnectingHR unconference and was clearly bitten by the social media bug. She has been a willing participant in the ConnectingHR community and is there for our weekly #chrchat. On Friday she posted about her efforts to get her company interested in using social media for communication. Not only did she write this on her blog, but she then posted the Pecha Kucha presentation that she used.

Wow! No nerves, no trepidation, just reaching out to the community with her thoughts and ideas. Jumping in and being part of the conversation.

HR professionals in the UK have tended to be slow adopters of social media, but with ambassadors like Alison I am convinced that the conversion will be quicker.

The second blog that really hit home was from @recruitgal – she is a UK Recruitment Manager with a major global brand and a new blogger. What did she write about? How not to do Cold Calls. A really informative and entertaining blog, and as a third party recruiter this is a great resource. Clearly she is frustrated by some of the approaches that she gets.

A potential client contact telling us how not to approach her. What more could you want? How else could you have got this information? I know that recruiters are not exactly welcoming of potential clients telling them what’s wrong with the industry, but seriously…how can you argue with an in-house recruitment manager telling you how not to try and do business with her. The blog is there…available through social media…no need to cold call to try and get a conversation.

Finally, and most heart warmingly, my friend Sarah Knight. Some of you may already be aware of her quest to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and raise money for a very worthy charity. Some may have even seen another UK HR blogger use his own blog to help raise £1000 in sponsorship for her…and have also read her blog of thanks. For me, her story epitomises everything that is good about social media connections, and how the willingness to engage and share goes way beyond trying to sell your latest product or service.

I have now met her twice socially, and spoken to her on the phone a few times. I didn’t know her before we connected on Twitter, yet there is little doubt that we are now ‘friends’. I encouraged her to start blogging about her quest, have offered my support when things were getting tough, and we are both part of a small Twitter community of people who have pulled together to encourage and inspire her.

So here’s my beautiful noise for this week…

Alison Chisnell – read about how she has tried to transform her company’s attitude towards social media – Practical ideas for becoming more social…and keeping it simple – and watch the presentation that she used – HR becoming social

Katie McNab ( @Recruitgal ) – find out what does and doesn’t work when you are trying to sell to a recruitment manager form a global brand – A cold calling masterclass…how not to do it

Sarah Knight – see how social media really works…if you work with someone who thinks it’s for geeks and nerds then get them to read it too – @theHRD…I thank you

Hope you enjoy reading them…let me know who’s making a beautiful noise for you this week?

I’m a Dude, Yeah!

Now I do like a challenge. There I was trying to pen a belated birthday post – the blog’s birthday, not mine – when I read Kevin Grossman’s Rocking Carnival of HR challenge!

How to combine the two? Easy!

Bloggers rock! Oh, they so do! Bloggers are rockstars, and we need more. All companies should have bloggers too.

Blogging is a way to share and learn, inform and inspire.

Let’s face it, more and more of us are now getting our fix of news and views from blogs…and more and more of us are putting our thoughts and ideas into blogs. Very few of us are trained writers or journalists, but we have a passion and interest that we want to share. A great blog really can inspire debate and get you thinking.

And where’s the music angle? Well regular followers of T Recs will know that David Bowie is one of my all time favourite rock stars…and there’s a clue in one of his songs…

“All The Young Dudes/Carry The News/Boogaloo Dudes/Carry The News”

Oh yes! Bowie’s apocalyptic song envisaged a dying world, with only five years left. (The track was originally written for the Ziggy Stardust album). No need for entertainment hence no need for musicians…they were left to ‘carry the news’ not unlike the wandering minstrels of medieval England, moving from town to town telling people what was happening.

How does this relate to blogging, I hear you ask??

I see bloggers, be they concerned with politics or economics, entertainment or culture, daily routines or grand schemes…or HR and Recruiting…to be the Young Dudes! The world (thankfully) really has a bit longer than 5 years to go…but I’m not sure print media has. Its online bloggers who will increasingly help spread the news, insight and new thinking.

So plug in that guitar…get ready for that opening riff…I’m a Dude, Yeah!